Job’s reply
16
Then Job answered and said, 2 📚“I have heard many such things. Miserable comforters are you all.
3 📚Let windy words come to an end. What compels you to answer?
4 📚I also could speak like you. If you were in my place, I could heap up words against you, and shake my head at you.
5 📚But I would strengthen you with the words of my mouth, and comfort from my lips would bring relief to you.
6 📚“If I speak my grief is not relieved. And if I refrain, how is it eased?
16:1-6 Since there is nothing new in the speech of Eliphaz Job doesn’t bother to answer it. These friends came to comfort him (Job 2:11), and it was comfort he wanted. But he got none from them. Nor, for that matter, from his own words.⚜
7 📚But now he has worn me out. You have made all my family desolate.
8 📚You have shriveled me up, which is a witness against me. And my emaciation rises up and testifies against me to my face.
9 📚He who hates me tears me in his wrath. He gnashes on me with his teeth. My enemy fastens his sharp gaze on me.
10 📚They gape at me with their mouth. They insultingly strike me on the cheek. They gather together against me.
16:10 Job includes his three friends in this.⚜
11 📚God has delivered me up to the ungodly, and handed me over to the wicked.
12 📚I was at ease, but he shattered me. He seized me by my neck and shook me to pieces. He has set me up as his target.
16:11-12 Refers to the first two chapters of the book.⚜
13 📚His archers surround me. He does not spare, but pierces my kidneys and pours out my gall on the ground.
14 📚He shatters me with break after break, running at me like a warrior.
15 📚“I have sewed sackcloth over my skin, and laid my horn in the dust.
16 📚My face is red with weeping and the shadow of death is on my eyelids,
16:15-16 These words all indicate intense grief and mourning (Gen 37:34; Jer 6:26; Lam 2:10; Ezek 27:30).⚜
17 📚Although my hands are free of violence, and my prayer is pure.
16:17 This he says in answer to Eliphaz’s accusation in Job 15:4-5.⚜
18 📚“O earth, do not cover my blood, so that my cry has no place!
16:18 Compare Gen 4:10. Job likens himself to an innocent man who has been murdered. He does not want the injustice he feels has been done to him to be concealed forever. He wants his cry to go on resounding everywhere until action is taken to make matters right.⚜
Job expresses a wonderful thought
19 📚Even now, see, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high.
16:19 Job means that God Himself is his witness and advocate. In his pain and depression he accused God of acting unjustly toward him, of being his enemy. But in the midst of these moments the faith in God which never leaves his heart shines forth again. If God will stand on his side and witness to his innocence, then, plainly, God is not his enemy. Job is not thinking clearly and logically; his thoughts are tossed this way and that by the fact of his extremely puzzling and dreadful circumstances. Unbelief and faith in God’s justice struggle together in his mind. First one then the other gets the upper hand. He knows deep in his heart that the one true God must be just, but what has happened to him seems evidence against it.⚜
20 📚My friends scorn me, but my eye pours out tears to God.
21 📚Oh, that someone might plead for a man with God, as a man pleads for his neighbour!
16:21 The one who pleads for Job turns out to be God Himself (Job 42:7). This may have been what Job had in mind. So now the believer’s advocate is God Himself – the Lord Jesus Christ (1 John 2:1).⚜
22 📚For after a few years have come, I will go on the path of no return.